TV Review: BREAKOUT KINGS, 1.1 - "Pilot"
Originally a pilot script that was refused further development by Fox, Breakout Kings managed to find a home with the A&E network. Created by Nick Santora and Matt Olmstead, two prolific writers on Prison Break, Breakout Kings cleaves close to the fourth season premise of that defunct show. By-the-book CPA Agent Charlie Duchamp (Laz Alonso) and hotheaded detective Ray Zancanelli (The Wire's Domenick Lombardozzi) resurrect an idea to recapture escaped convicts by assembling a team of criminals with breakout experience themselves. As the marketing paraphrases, "it takes a con to catch a con"...
The "breakout kings" (a title amusingly derided as being nonsensical) are comprised of: erstwhile child prodigy and compulsive gambler Dr Lloyd Lowery (Jimmi Simpson); wheeler-dealer Sean "Shea" Daniels (Malcolm Goodwin), sexy con artist Philomena "Philly" Rotchcliffer (Nicole Steinwedell), whose character is unnecessarily replaced by a tracker called Erica (Serina Swan) after the pilot; and, briefly, a sneering bruiser called Gunderson. The cons are told that for every escapee they recapture, a month of jail time will be shaved off their sentence, and they'll be transferred to minimum-security prisons while they're part of the program, but if they try to escape they'll have their sentences doubled. Their first assignment is to recapture Augustus Tillman, a man with anger management issues who escaped from Fishkill Correctional Facility while serving six months for killing a biker who insulted his wife. Statistics say there's only a 5% chance of recapturing escaped prisoners after 72-hours, so the chase is on and the clock is ticking...
The concept is one of those ridiculous but enticing ideas you can't believe nobody's shaped into a TV series before. Breakout Kings combines two things I can't resist (prison escapes and a teams of badasses) but the pilot is rather disappointing and occasionally inert. The key reason is simple: none of the characters leap off the screen and singlehandedly demand you'll tune in next week. Instead, there seemed to have been more time spent on the plot mechanics of the first assignment than making us love-to-hate this incongruent team's dynamic. The premise and characters are swiftly introduced in five minutes, but that leaves a lot of time that could have been better spent making us care about everyone.
Instead, the writing's formulaic and clichéd -- particularly the pairing of Duchamp and Zancanelli, which could be seen as a traditional mismatched "buddy cop" scenario, but still feels tedious. Worse, the only con who leaves any impression during the pilot is Lowery, but even he's something of a lazy clichéd genius with acute observational skills. Strangely, Nicole Steinwedell managed to add spice and personality as the team's hustler (while also stripping to her lingerie), but is written out of the show from hereon in, for no discernible reason.
Was it really so difficult to come up with a handful of fun, delinquent characters? If nothing else, I was hoping Breakout Kings would manage to distract us from its weekly formula (prisoner escapes, a group of cons lead the manhunt) by crafting a team of larger-than-life characters to relish watching. Imagine the cast of Con Air in this scenario and you have an infinitely more entertaining TV show playing out in your imagination.
As Prison Break alums, Santora and Olmstead are well-versed in keeping a show propulsive, so there's enough pace and urgency to the pilot to ensure it never gets boring, and an unexpected (if hardly thrilling) twist in the denouement. I just think they'll run into problems because the formula will likely become repetitive very quickly, whereas the spark that kept Prison Break alive (long after its natural expiry) was the preposterous half-improvised feel that gave everything an incredibly unpredictable, ludicrously watchable sensibility. Breakout Kings doesn't feel like it'll be anywhere near as unpredictable, just formulaic. And with a group of characters who feel incredibly low-key, given the potential, I'm not sure what the writers have to sustain audience interest going forward. There's no serialized element at work, either, which for me gives everything more of a disposable feel. But I know plenty of other people prefer self-contained, episodic TV where you can miss a batch of episodes and rejoin the show whenever you want. It's a matter of taste.
Overall, the pilot of Breakout Kings is distinctly average fare, quickly smothering the fun from its alluring premise. More time should have been spent hiring actors with screen presence, so if the stories don't interest you it's still fun watching the ensemble bounce off each other. That's a lesson you'd think Olmstead and Santora would have learned from Prison Break, which had a very mixed cast in terms of individual acting ability, but as a group they clicked together on-screen. I didn't get the same feeling from the so-called breakout kings, unfortunately. Still, if you like being pandered to, Prison Break's Robert Knepper is guest-starring as his character T-Bag in an upcoming episode.
WRITERS: Nick Santora & Matt Olmstead DIRECTOR: Gavin Hood CAST: Laz Alonso, Brooke Nevin, Domenick Lombardozzi, Malcolm Goodwin, Serinda Swan & Jimmi Simpson TRANSMISSION: 6 March 2011, A&E, 10/9c